Dec 14

Andrew Lloyd Webber

Greatly Appreciated

ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER
 
 
Andrew Lloyd Webber  (born 22 March 1948) is an English composer and impresario of musical theatre.  Several of his musicals have run for more than a decade both in the West End and on Broadway.  He has composed 13 musicals, a song cycle, a set of variations, two film scores, and a Latin Requiem Mass.  Several of his songs have been widely recorded and were hits outside of their parent musicals, notably "The Music of the Night" from The Phantom of the Opera, "I Don't Know How to Love Him" from Jesus Christ Superstar, "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina" and "You Must Love Me" from Evita, "Any Dream Will Do" from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and "Memory" from Cats.  In 2001. the New York Times referred to him as "the most commercially successful composer in history".  (More from Wikipedia)
 
 

From the beginning, Jesus Christ Superstar was conceived for the stage by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice – just 21 and 25 years old at the time, respectively – but in order to raise money for the ambitious and undoubtedly controversial theatrical production, they decided to record the album first. 

 

Ian Gillan, the lead singer of Deep Purple sang the part of Jesus on the Jesus Christ Superstar album.  In addition to Gillan, the presence of rock session musicians like guitarists Neil Hubbard and Chris Spedding, bassist Alan Spenner  and drummer Bruce Rowland gives the album more of a rock flavor than most of Andrew Lloyd Webber's later work. 

 

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat is another Biblically themed musical created by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice and is the first of their productions to be presented publicly, predating Jesus Christ Superstar by several years.  

 

(October 2014)
 
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Just because a hip hop musical made this big a splash doesn’t mean that rock musicals have gone away.  Broadway titan Andrew Lloyd Webber returned to his roots with his current show, School of Rock that opened on Broadway four months after Hamilton, on December 6, 2015.  The musical is based on the delightful Jack Black film from 2003, School of Rock that follows a washed-up rock musician who conceives the idea of masquerading as a substitute teacher and pressing a group of fourth graders into backing him at the local Battle of the Bands in order to get his career back on track.
 
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s first major show was the audacious Jesus Christ Superstar (1970); this rock opera actually did start out as an album, Jesus Christ Superstar, with Deep Purple lead singer Ian Gillan in the title role, while Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton musical went straight to the stage.
 
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The next Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, Evita – my personal favorite among the Webber shows – started out as a rock opera album that was released in 1975.  In a novel move, the narrator of the story of Eva "Evita" Peron, the wife of Argentine dictator Juan Perón, is famed South American and Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara (identified only as “Che” initially).  Mandy Patinkin launched his career with his Tony-winning role as Che on Broadway; on the original Evita album and in earlier productions, Che is played by Colm Wilkinson, who later became world famous in originating the role of Jean Valjean in the 1985 West End (London) and Broadway musical Les Misèrables.
 
While many of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s shows had pop and rock music flourishes, including his other Biblical musical, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, his later shows until School of Rock have been more traditional musicals for the most part.
 
(September 2016)
 
Last edited: March 22, 2021